Intimacy in Digital Communication

Leaving my home, my country, a comfortable womb, I start a new communication journey. Iâ€™m the person who loves to express myself well. I love to build up relationships with people by talking to them. Having intimate relationships with good friends makes me feel comfortable and happy. As a foreign student in United States, communicating in second language and keeping in touch with friends in Taiwan brought challenges to me in building up and maintaining relationships. For keeping in touch with friends in Taiwan, I used instant messenger intensively. However, the more I rely on it, the more I felt insecure. It seems this communication technology is not the blanket which brought enough warmth for comforting insecurity in mind. In my thesis, Iâ€™m going to investigate how the need of intimacy drives us in communication, explore the role of human intimacy in digital communication media, and the role of media in human intimacy. And finally, Iâ€™m going to discuss how the understanding the need of intimacy contributes in designing communication media through researches and related projects.